Wednesday, April 2, 2008
3:00 - 4:00 PM
Grand Ballroom B, Student Center
Eastern Michigan University

Photo credit: Richard Kelly Photography

Prof. Wing is President's Professor and Head (on leave)
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
and
Assistant Director for Computer & Information Science and Engineering
National Science Foundation

My vision for the 21st Century: Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. The two A's to computational thinking are abstraction and automation. Thinking like a computer scientist means thinking at multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously; and it is the automation of our abstractions that gives us the ability and audacity to scale. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science.

8.5 x 11 announcement
Horizontal poster with graphics